Elisabetta > Elisabetta's Quotes

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“Why should things be easy to understand?”
― Thomas Pynchon

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!”
― Eugene O'Neill

“Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open arms into their misfortune?”
― Elias Canetti

“In ogni essere umano si celano possibilità infinite, che non devono essere scatenate invano. Poiché è terribile quando l'intero uomo risuona di tanti echi, nessuno dei quali diventa una vera voce.”
― Elias Canetti, Notes from Hampstead: The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971

“There's no tyrant like a brain. ”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”
― Aesop

“Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth - don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency.”
― Aesop

“After all is said and done, more is said than done.”
― Aesop

“Please all, and you will please none.”
― Aesop

“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mostly Sally

“Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?”
― Douglas Coupland, JPod

“...blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos. ”
― Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic

“Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“... sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

“don't let jesus in. AA is just one obsession replaced with another”
― Irvine Welsh, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

“Choose a life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers... Choose DSY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away in the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself, choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka